Brief items
Security
Quotes of the week
If you stop people installing their own software on systems they
supposedly own then you are part of the problem, and whatever
whining and marketing you do you share responsibility with the
powers who abuse what you created.
— Alan
Cox
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 4.13-rc3, released on July 30. Linus said: "Usually rc2 is the really quiet one, but this release cycle rc2 was fairly busy and it made me worry a bit about whether there was something bad going on with 4.13. But no, it was just random timing, and people got started sending in fixes early, and this release cycle it's rc3 that is small."
Regression tracking has returned for 4.13; the current report shows eight known problems. Note that Thorsten Leemhuis has adopted a new identifier mechanism to try to make tracking easier.
Stable updates: 4.12.4, 4.9.40, 4.4.79, and 3.18.63 were released on July 27.
Email2git: Matching Linux Code with its Mailing List Discussions (Linux.com)
Linux.com is carrying an article about email2git by its developer, Alexandre Courouble. Email2git is a way to match up commits and the email thread that discussed them. It currently targets the kernel and threads from the linux-kernel mailing list. There are two separate ways to use it, as an extension to cregit (at https://cregit.linuxsources.org/) that allows browsing changes at the token level or via a search by commit ID interface. "The Linux project's email-based reviewing process is highly effective in filtering open source contributions on their way from mailing list discussions towards Linus Torvalds' Git repository. However, once integrated, it can be difficult to link Git commits back to their review comments in mailing list discussions, especially when considering commits that underwent multiple versions (and hence review rounds), that belong to a multi-patch series, or that were cherry-picked. As an answer to these and other issues, we created email2git, a patch retrieving system built for the Linux kernel. For a given commit, the tool is capable of finding the email patch as well as the email conversation that took place during the review process. We are currently improving the system with support for multi-patch series and cherry-picking." The code for email2git is available on GitHub.
Quotes of the week
To get an idea of the design, I'd recommend you start with patches
#33 and #57, which try to shed some light on the approach that I've
taken. And before that, please digest some of the GICv3/GICv4
architecture documentation (less than 800 pages!). Once you feel
reasonably insane, you'll be in the right mood to read the code.
— Marc Zyngier
Because an interesting thing has happened in the last 15
years. When you take out your phone and pull up a web page, the
machine that sent you that web page is probably running Linux. Of
the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world, 497 of them Linux. And
Linux is in over one billion phones at the heart of
Android. Instead of winning the desktop, we won everywhere else.
And that’s why last year I left my comfortable big company job
working on Linux where I’d been for 12 years, and I started working
full-time in the Bitcoin community.
— Rusty
Russell
Gah, I'm so rusty, if I were any rustier I'd be doing bitcoin.
— Avi Kivity
Distributions
Qubes OS 4.0-rc1 released
For those who are curious about what the next release of the Qubes OS distribution will bring (and want to help make it better): the first Qubes OS 4.0 release candidate is available. "This new Core Stack allows to easily extend the Qubes Architecture in new directions, allowing us to finally build (in a clean way) lots of things we’ve wanted for years, but which would have been too complex to build on the 'old' Qubes infrastructure. The new Qubes Admin API, which we introduced in a recent post, is a prime example of one such feature."
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 released
Red Hat has released the fourth update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 offers new automation capabilities designed to limit IT complexity while enhancing workload security and performance for traditional and cloud-native applications. This provides a powerful, flexible operating system backbone to address enterprise IT needs across physical servers, virtual machines and hybrid, public and multi-cloud footprints." See the release notes for more details.
Distribution quotes of the week
As expected, Cauldron has been flooded with large updates, and despite their best efforts, everything seems to be working well. Note that big breakage now is very normal, pushing the risky and large scale changes to very low-level things now gives the most room for testing, so things are expected to break. That said, the toolchain and rpm still have some large updates and changes to come, so there is still plenty of opportunity for things to break.
— Donald Stewart
On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 10:49:58AM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
— Matthew Miller
> As with anybody else planning a feature, having strictly time based releases has a downside and an upside:
> - If you are the weak link, you are kicked off the boat
> - But you know another boat is coming soon!
Also +1. But, you know, no _kicking_. More... gently lowered. :)
Development
Trouble at the Krita Foundation
The Krita Foundation is having some unexpected financial difficulties and is looking for help. "Even while we’re working on a new beta for Krita 3.2 and a new development build for 4.0 (with Python, on Windows!), we have to release some bad news as well. The Krita Foundation is having trouble with the Dutch tax authorities."
LibreOffice 5.4 released with new features for Writer, Calc and Impress
The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.4, the last major release of the LibreOffice 5.x family. There are some new features in every module and a number of incremental improvements to Microsoft Office file compatibility. "Thanks to the efforts of developers, the XML description of a new document written by LibreOffice is 50% smaller in the case of ODF (ODT), and around 90% smaller in the case of OOXML (DOCX), in comparison with the same document generated by the leading proprietary office suite."
MythTV 29.0 released
The release of MythTV 29.0 has been announced. MythTV is a Digital Video Recorder and home media center hub. According to the release notes, the backend now listens on all addresses and there is a new MythTV startup page. Also mythtv-setup now uses MythUI, support has been added for IPV6 link-local addresses, handling of Bluray overlays has been improved, and more. LWN looked at MythTV in April 2016.Suricata 4.0 released
Version 4.0 of the Suricata intrusion detection system (IDS) and network security monitor (NSM) has been released. The release has improved detection for threats in HTTP, SSH, and other protocols, improvements to TLS, new support for NFS, additions to the extensible event format (EVE) JSON logging, some parts have been implemented in Rust, and more. "This is the first release in which we’ve implemented parts in the Rust language using the Nom parser framework. This work is inspired by Pierre Chiffliers’ (ANSSI), talk at SuriCon 2016 (pdf). By compiling with –enable-rust you’ll get a basic NFS parser and a re-implementation of the DNS parser. Feedback on this is highly appreciated. The Rust support is still experimental, as we are continuing to explore how it functions, performs and what it will take to support it in the community. Additionally we included Pierre Chiffliers Rust parsers work. This uses external Rust parser ‘crates’ and is enabled by using –enable-rust-experimental. Initially this adds a NTP parser."
Development quotes of the week
Over in Utopia, when you press the button on a device, you get a press event from the hardware. When you release said button, you get a release event from the hardware. Together, they form the button click interaction we have come to learn and love over the last couple of decades. Life is generally merry and the sunshine to rainbow to lollipop ratio is good. Meanwhile, over here in the real world, buttons can be quite dodgy, don't always work like they're supposed to, lollipops are unhealthy and boy, have you seen that sunburn the sunshine gave me?
— Peter
Hutterer
The second new format is really two formats, from either side of the 2-digit-year divide: PostScript-based Adobe Illustrator and PDF-based Adobe Illustrator. Evince now declares to support "the format" if both of the backends are built and supported. It only took 12 years, and somebody stumbling upon the feature request while doing bug triaging. The nooks and crannies of free software where the easy feature requests get lost :)
— Bastien
Nocera (Thanks to Paul Wise)
Seriously, it's time for a change, time for sane shell syntax, time
for ... the one true language. (No no! Not the oblig xkcd cartxxn,
ANYthing but the oblig!! We need standards, lots of them, and more
standards!)
— Zenaan Harkness
And since all the existing shell and scripting standards are completely insufficient, it's time for the obligatory implementation of a new, all-encompassing shell with universal syntax applicable to all languages, all tools and all environments, incestuously binding with all other languages and admitting no deficiency!
That's right - you guessed it :) , it's time for Lisp!
Miscellaneous
EFF: Bassel Khartabil, In Memoriam
The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Bassel Khartabil, Syrian open source developer, blogger, entrepreneur, hackerspace founder, and free culture advocate, was executed by the Syrian authorities. "Bassel was a central figure in the global free culture movement, connecting it and promoting it to Syria's emerging tech community as it existed before the country was ransacked by civil war. He co-founded Aiki Lab, Syria's first hackerspace, in Damascus in 2010. He was a contributor to Mozilla's Firefox browser and the Syrian lead for Creative Commons. His influence went beyond Syria, however: he was a key attendee at the Middle East's bloggers' conferences, and played a vital role in the negotiations in Doha in 2010 that led to a common language for discussing fair use and copyright across the Arab-speaking world." (Thanks to Paul Wise)
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
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